May 4 – August 18, 2024

We compare The Games' jaw-dropping photographs to Classical works of art

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Is a slower pace of life the answer to burnout – or just another lifestyle brag?

From derelict shipyards and military bases to colossal cooling towers

How a letter written by Albert Einstein ushered in the age of the atomic bomb

There's no-one to root for in this nihilistic spectacle about the horrors of war

Why NWA's Straight Outta Compton thrilled – and outraged the US

Season three of Industry is more ruthless and fascinating than ever

The creator of Claire Danes drama My So-Called Life on why it has endured

L.A. Story is the name of a 1991 movie written by Steve Martin that the Los Angeles Times once voted the greatest Los Angeles–set film of the 20th century. It will also be the name of a Hauser & Wirth show co-organized by Martin with curator Ingrid Schaffner and senior director Mike Davis. The show will kick off the fall season in LA this year.

The show, due to open September 12 at the gallery giant’s West Hollywood location, will feature landscapes, abstractions, and more that all contain an Angeleno flavor, per the gallery. Although there will be representations of Los Angeles landmarks here, the gallery allows that some works will not explicitly depict the city, since the show’s approach is “far from literal.”

Certain works, such as paintings of rippling water by David Hockney and Calida Rawles, will allude to the backyards of many Los Angeles homes that have swimming pools. And a Vija Celmins painting of a hand firing a gun will be enlisted to speak to Hollywood genre filmmaking. Naturally, a number of famed LA-based artists, from Mark Bradford to Ed Ruscha, will figure in the exhibition.

Martin said in a statement, “I’m thrilled that ‘L.A. Story’ is the focus of so many wonderful artists and a wonderful gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which is just across the street from the Troubadour, where I first stepped foot on Santa Monica Blvd., which began my L.A. sojourn.”

Martin, who appeared several times on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list during the 1990s, has some prior curatorial experience: he helped organize the Hammer Museum’s Lawren Harris show in 2016.

Three senior staffers no longer work at Pace Gallery, one of the biggest galleries in the world, ARTnews has learned.

Gary Waterston has left the gallery, just six months after he was hired for the newly created position of executive vice president of global sales and operations. Pace’s senior director , curatorial, and artist management – Sarah Levine – and curatorial director Mark Beasley have also both departed.

When Waterston, a former director at Gagosian, was hired earlier this year, Pace said he was “among the most senior level of the leadership team, working closely with Samanthe Rubell and Marc Glimcher,” Pace’s president and CEO, respectively

Levine, who was the global director of marketing and communications at Lehmann Maupin, was hired by Pace in the summer of 2023, while Beasley was appointed to his post in 2019, having previously been a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Beasley was picked to lead Pace Live, a newly unveiled program of performances and other events.

“I confirm the departures of Gary Waterston, Sarah Levine, and Mark Beasley,” a Pace spokesperson said. “We parted ways [with Waterston] through a mutual and amicable decision that the newly created global role was not going to be successful based in London. We wish him the best in his next ventures.”

When asked about the reason for Levine and Beasley’s exit, Pace said, “As all businesses do, we regularly evaluate our priorities which occasionally necessitates staffing changes—including making new hires as well as identifying redundant roles. This is standard practice and ensures we’re delivering the results we strive for as a gallery.”

Country music legend Johnny Cash will receive a statue in his honor in the United States capitol. It will be unveiled next month, House speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced on Thursday, NBC reported.

Cash was born February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, a small town roughly 60 miles south of Little Rock, Arkansas. During his lifetime, he sold 90 million records worldwide. His music spanning the genres of country, blues, rock, and gospel, Cash was inducted into Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, and into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. He received numerous awards, among them, 13 Grammys and 9 Country Music Association Awards. Cash died in 2003 at age 71 from diabetes-related complications.

His statue joins that of another Arkansas native, Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader who headed the state’s NAACP chapter and mentored the Black students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, and integrated Central High School in 1957. Her statue was unveiled on May 8 in National Statuary Hall.

The two replace monuments of 19th-century American Bar Association president and Confederate sympathizer Uriah M. Rose and James P. Clarke, a late 17th-century and early 18th-century governor and US senator, and a white supremacist. Clarke’s racist remarks included calling on the Democratic Party to preserve “white standards of civilization.”

The work of Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse, Cash’s eight-foot-tall statue depicts him with a guitar across his back and a Bible in hand. The unveiling is slated to occur in Emancipation Hall September 24.

An artist from St. Petersburg who was arrested in 2022 for protesting against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was included in the biggest prisoner exchange since the Cold War between Russia and the West.

The swap happened on Thursday when 16 people from the US, Germany, and Russia—including the American journalist Evan Gershkovich—were exchanged for eight Russian prisoners, hit men and spies among them.

The deal came after years of complex negotiations between Washington and Moscow, and culminated in emotional scenes as the prisoners walked free on a runway in the Turkish capital of Ankara. The swap was meant to have included Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who died in an Arctic jail before the agreement was concluded.

US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were on hand to personally welcome the trio of freed Americans when they finally landed back on US soil, while Russian leader Vladimir Putin greeted the returning Russians in Moscow. Vadim Krasikov, the Russian assassin who murdered an anti-Kremlin Chechen fighter in Berlin, was included in the deal.  

The Russian artist, Sasha Skochilenko, was arrested for replacing supermarket labels with information about the Kremlin’s assault on the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Russia nearly razed the city soon after invading Ukraine in early 2022. On one label, Skochilenko allegedly wrote, “the Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people were hiding from shelling in it.” She reportedly wanted to demonstrate how free speech has been curtailed under Putin’s rule.

With a world in crisis and an art market spinning out of control, ace art-world consultants Chen & Lampert deliver hard truths in response to questions sent by Art in America readers from far and wide.

I lost the lease on my studio and can’t afford another in today’s market. There is half a room at home that I can take over, but it isn’t big enough to both work in and store all my art. My wife is suggesting that I have a sale on Instagram, but I don’t want to give the impression of being desperate or cheap. My only other option is to discard a lot of art since I don’t have space or money to keep it all anymore. The idea of doing this depresses me to no end. What should I do?

Your depression must be deeply debilitating because we are experiencing serious secondhand fatigue trying to gloss up an answer that won’t hurt your feelings. The loss of your studio has forced you to reckon with a chilling reality that every financially strapped creative spirit must eventually face: all art is landfill unless someone cherishes it. Love might be a lot to ask for, but, luckily, people, especially family members, also hold onto art because of guilt. Take solace in knowing that the canvases you don’t trash will eventually be the storage headache of your beloved wife or a grieving friend you appoint in your elaborate will.

Never forget that in the world of collecting, you are the biggest collector of your own art. No one has a collection as encyclopedic as yours. The problem with monopolizing your own market is that other potentially interested parties cannot consider its aesthetic, cultural, or financial value. We don’t know your background: perhaps you are represented by a gallery, and maybe your work has sold in the past. If so, you might be justified in not wanting to offer these works up as BOGO specials on your socials. That said, if you haven’t sold much work and are not currently (or ever) showing in galleries, it doesn’t feel like a fire sale would tank your career. Your pride may be knocked a little, but this could also open up a door, or at least reduce clutter.

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Has anyone ever said anything nice about your art? Congrats to them—now they get to own a piece of it. Share both the care and the burden with those who have bare walls and empty basements. Think of your family, friends, coworkers, colleagues, and acquaintances as your elite new patrons and benefactors. They won’t be paying for your work, but they will be saving you money that would otherwise get blown on storage and therapy bills.

An Ohio golf course situated atop a set of Native American earthworks will close, bringing an end to a legal battle over the land that has stretched on for years.

The private course, located in the city of Newark, opened in 1910, and ever since, golfers have been allowed to play on earthworks that are thought to have been built somewhere between 2,000 and 1,600 years ago. The Ohio Historical Connection, a historical society that manages cultural heritage in the state, acquired the deed to the land in 1933 and has leased it to the Moundbuilders Country Club ever since.

The earthworks, formally known as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks and more casually called the Octagon Earthworks, are considered historically important. They were nominated in 2018 for inclusion on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites, although their status is still pending.

UNESCO’s citation for the earthworks labels them the “most representative surviving expressions of the Indigenous tradition now referred to as the Hopewell culture.” They create rolling hills and uneven surfaces, and are thought to envision the cycles of the Sun and the Moon.

In 2018, after UNESCO began to consider the earthworks for World Heritage status, the Ohio History Connection sued Moundbuilders, seeking the full rights to the land. The suit was meant to ensure greater public access to these earthworks, which have historically been off limits for much of the year to those who aren’t members of Moundbuilders.

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THE HEADLINES

THE IRE OF RESTORERS. The Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón, an 18th-century Spanish church in the northeastern city of Soria, was given a bold makeover that has left the building’s cherubim looking startled and local architecture lovers outraged. Professional restorers in Spain have even demanded explanations. The online newspaper El Confidencial, which describes the makeover as “a crime against heritage,” picked up on the concerns of a group, Soria Patrimonio (Soria Heritage) that had posted before-and-after pictures of the paint job on X, showing how the once white nave had been striped a dusky pink and its cherubim crudely freshened up. “What have they done to the Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón?” the group asked. “It’s a listed building, but even if it weren’t, any work on a monument such as this had to be subject to minimum guarantees.” Soria Patrimonio told El Confidencia that the work was unsatisfactory, as it had been carried out without the necessary preliminary studies, and had altered the appearance that the church had had for the past century. “We’ve ended up with the decorative elements being outlined and the cherubs – which were white before – becoming caricature-like.”

NO MORE PIGEONHOLING. Urban birds are often pigeonholed as “flying rats,” but Iván Argote’s giant pigeon is called “Dinosaur,” in reference to its size. The sculpture is 21 feet tall, including the 5-foot-tall plinth where it will perch on New York’s Highline. In October, the gigantic aluminum installation will replace Pamela Rosenkranz’s Old Tree, at the intersection of 10th Avenue and 30th Street, and remain there for 18 months. This artwork isn’t just a hyper-realistic rendering of the pigeon; instead it will challenge traditions of who and what we monumentalize, as well as explore ideas around migration and the long view of history. “Iván Argote’s ‘Dinosaur’ will add great wit to the skyline of New York,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art. “Iván has a charming ability as an artist to take something familiar and make us consider it anew in profound ways.” The pigeon statue was one of the most polarizing proposals when High Line Art shared artwork suggestions a few years ago, so it’s sure to ruffle some feathers.

THE DIGEST

Ask any veteran of Aspen ArtWeek what to expect when attending for the first time and, after a few sentences about the community’s philanthropic ideals and the caliber of collectors, you’re sure to be told about the nature. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the nature, the landscape” is a constant refrain, always said without cynicism or irony. It was no surprise then that, less than an hour after an expectedly turbulent flight on a model airplane from Denver, I was invited to a cold plunge early the following morning in the nearby Roaring Fork River with a group of art dealers.

That kind of invitation is characteristic of Aspen, which seems to be a through-the-looking-glass version of Miami’s art week in December. The wealth is the same, but you trade humid beach weather for mountain air and all-nighters, guest-lists, and exclusive clubs for hikes and yoga. Everyone is invited to everything, with the caveat that you have to make it there first. And whereas Miami centers around the spectacle of Art Basel, Aspen ArtWeek’s home base is the Aspen Art Museum, where every couple of hours there’s another event. There are also artist talks and artist walks and tours of collectors’ homes. But the overall atmosphere, even with the busy schedule, is relaxed, in no small part because the entire town of just over 7,000 residents is eminently walkable.

The quick plunge in the gentle river of “snow melt,” as I was told, is a pleasant if prickly jolt to the system (translation: f—king cold). After the short drive back to town, I was treated to a walk-through of Allison Katz’s extraordinary and expansive group show, “In the House of the Trembling Eye,” at the museum. The Aspen Art Museum has a history of artist-curated shows. In December, it staged an exhibition of John Chamberlain’s work, “The Tighter They’re Wound, The Harder They Unravel” curated by Urs Fischer, and in 2022–23, the artist Monica Majoli organized a museum-wide survey exhibition of Andy Warhol called “Lifetimes.” 

The Katz show is special for a number of reasons. First, it marks the museum’s 45th anniversary and a decade in its current location. Second, the exhibition is made up of works from private collections in and around Aspen, as well as Katz’s own work and ancient Pompeian fresco fragments, the first time such relics of antiquity have been juxtaposed with contemporary art in North America, according to the museum.

“It’s been quite an interesting challenge, an enjoyable one,” Stella Bottai, a senior curator at large who helped research and organize the exhibition, told me during the tour. “Allison wanted to take Pompeii and the domus (essentially an ancient Roman townhouse) as an inspiration and organizing principle for the show, the reason being that the moment you engage with domesticity and personal collections—and many of these works are lived with in private homes—something quite interesting happens in terms of how the boundaries between private and public overlap.”

Artists, scholars, and activists are narrating the climate crisis in many different ways, but typically, the emphasis is on urgency—as with the dramatic actions of Just Stop Oil, for example. Against this, Black Gold Tapestry (2008–17), an embroidered artwork nine years in the making by Canadian artist Sandra M. Sawatzky, stands apart. Currently on view at the MassArt Art Museum in Boston, the nearly 220-foot tapestry insists on a much longer timeline—both in its production and in the history it tells. The work focuses on humans’ relationship to oil over the course of millennia, and is part of an exhibition, titled “Displacement,” that addresses the human consequences of environmental change, including the forced migration so many people experience in the wake of either immediate disaster or slowly shifting climates.

While oil culture is generally thought of as a distinctly modern phenomenon, Sawatzky’s research reveals human engagements with the material dating to the Neolithic era. Showing illustrative, colorful scenes of Neanderthals fashioning tools with sticky tar, bitumen mortar in Mesopotamian structures, Chinese naphtha stoves, and eventually the US automotive industry, the work reveals the ways oil has permeated human production across cultures. Dinosaurs dancing along the edge of Sawatzky’s tapestry remind us of the 65-million-year-old source of the fossil fuels we are so rapidly burning.

Sawatzky was inspired by the iconic Bayeux Tapestry, and her work borrows a number of conceits from that 11th-century account of a Norman conquest, including its linear narrative and the playful dialogue between the scrolling, horizontal storyline and the border of the image. In the Bayeux Tapestry, the arrival of Hayley’s Comet causes a break in the frame. But Sawatzky’s story offers no such moment of rupture pinpointing the moment when it all went wrong, marking the dawn of the Anthropocene. Instead, it emphasizes a continually unfolding story in which everyone has a role to play.

The slowness of Sawatzky’s embroidery recalls writer Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, a way of describing the cumulative, incremental effects of climate change. Environmental change is often insidious and unseen. “Displacement” finds ways to help us visualize that violence regardless, focusing on human migration, adaptation, and extinction. In Akea Brionne’s Begin Again: Land of Enchantment (2024), an embellished tapestry based on a photograph, the artist references her own family’s migration from Belize to Honduras to New Orleans, moves often driven by shifting waterways that induced both flooding and drought. Three women wait with stuffed suitcases in a desert landscape. Their sequined garments, incongruous with the outdoor scene, suggest both a resilient dreamscape and an alienation from the landscape that results from constant displacement.

In his book Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Nixon emphasizes the particular injustice of environmental crises precipitated by the actions of the wealthy but felt most acutely by the poor for whom migration is a means of survival. At MAAM, the universal history proposed by Sawatzky’s tapestry is counterbalanced by artists who tell specific stories about the uneven realities of climate change. Nguyen Smith’s Bundle House Borderlines No. 3 (Isle de Tribamartica), from 2017, disaggregates the idea of a singular Caribbean by way of a fantastical hand drawn and collaged map that combines the shorelines of Trinidad, Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, and Jamaica. Referencing the antiquated style of colonial cartography and the attendant misunderstandings of local geographies, Smith asks viewers to think about what they really know about the Caribbean—a region he terms “ground zero” of climate disaster—in a work laced with Trinidadian and Zambian soil. Sculptures on view nearby model “bundle houses” made of found objects, small evocations of the scavenger existence required in the wake of disaster.

David Zwirner has eliminated around ten staffers from a team of engineers and web developers hired in March last year to revamp the gallery’s online presence.

“We have significantly reorganized our digital team,” a gallery spokesperson told ARTnews in a statement. The change to its workforce comes more than four years after the gallery made expanding online a primary goal during the pandemic in 2020. In July of that year, the mega-dealer laid off 20 percent of its staff to make up for a shortfall in sales.

A gallery spokesperson said the team was reorganized after its staffers finished building a custom database and migrated its website to a new platform, a process that took around a year to finalize.

The most recent layoffs, which amount to three percent of the gallery’s workforce, come several months after Zwirner shuffled staff at Platform, a separate Zwirner-financed digital marketplace that partners with smaller galleries. Launched in 2021, Platform laid off two heads of content, and another full-time staffer from its ten-person team last fall, according to two former employees who spoke to ARTnews on the condition of anonymity.

By December, the small startup had trimmed its staff further to a mere five and pivoted its model, launching collectible products like jewelry, tote bags, and sculptural editions by Josh Smith, Raymond Pettibon, and Katherine Bernhardt, some of the biggest artists in Zwirner’s stable, occasioned by a glowing feature in the New York Times Style section.